On Education, Stress, and Success

I'm starting another run at the Futures Forum Project:  three subjects over two periods with one teacher (two team-teaching this year) that emphasizes an intentional digital footprint as we write for an authentic audience including students from classes in the 14 other participating schools.  Whew!

There's no way I can implement every idea suggested by the other teachers in the program, so this is my weeding out time - figuring out what's most important to try this time with the kids.  I've come across several links and videos lately that have me thinking about education in general.  Some recent articles discuss a survey that suggests our kids are miserable and totally stressed out in school, yet elsewhere articles complain that they're too apathetic and aren't trying hard enough.  Is the stress making them shut down?

The Not-So-Awful Truth About Being Single

"If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company."  Jean-Paul Sartre

In yesterday's Globe & Mail, Margaret Wente claims that people can get to a much greater depth of understanding and "perfection" of self through a married relationship than they can possibly do if they remain single.

"...the road to self-actualization isn't through perfection of the independent self, but through imperfect, messy, long-term relationships.  Everybody needs someone else to nurture, and someone to stand up for them, and someone to plan the future with, and someone with whom they share a past."  

Wente stumbles into one of the most annoyingly common false dichotomies surrounding this issue:  either you're married or you're alone.  And she continues that single people are lonely implying, of course, that loneliness never ventures into a marriage, that it's solely a quality of aloneness.  I've never been married, yet I know too well the messiness of relationships with myriad friends and colleagues whom I nurture, stand up for, and with whom I share a past.  We don't plan a future together in the same "until death" way that some married people manage, but that shared future in marriage is often illusory.  The future is unknowable.  Shit happens, and happily married people can still end up on their own.  

A Stoic Resurgence

In reading a few other blogs lately, Stoicism has come up a few times, and I'm seeing it in a few books I've been reading lately too.  Maybe it'll stick this time.

In Robin Hanson's blog discussing why middle aged people are most pessimistic, I suggested that maybe it's a point in life where we know too much horrible crap happening in the world, and it's making us miserable.  And we're just before a point in which we've found a way to cope with the unending tragedies that are part of being alive.  Maybe my cohort will become happier in a stoic manner - once we get our heads around how little control we have over the world, accept that many of these problems aren't ours to solve, and develop a tranquility around it all.

Then stoicism came up again in arguments about the relationship to Cognitive Behaviour Therapy via Lieter Reports, a N.Y. Times article by Kathryn Schulz about self-help books' suggested dualism of selfhood.

The Lasting Influence of Rhoda Morgenstern

I just saw that the house featured in the Mary Tyler Moore show is up for sale.  And I've been thinking about how much I was influenced by the character of Rhoda.  I used to wait for the few minutes she'd be on screen each episode.  I'm sure I'm not alone.

Climate Change as an Asteroid

Over the break, I got a Kindle app for my Macbook (free!) when I realized I could wait for morning to go to Wordsworth to get one of Paul Krugman's books, or get it right that second and start reading.  Immediate rewards are very motivating.

The book outlines the diminishing overlap between Democrats and Republicans and the increasing rich/poor gap, and explains how the government could actively change this current scenario.  It's not impossible at all to manipulate things to stop the debt crisis and eradicate the kind of poverty the states is seeing in its "1st world" citizens.  The problem as I see it is that the people in power are in the 1%, and they'd have to actively destroy their own means to wealth in the process.  What could possibly make them want to do that to themselves?  What could make people work collectively at the expense of the gains they've made individually?  A common enemy.  Kennedy said that long ago, and now we've got a few.

On RESPs, EAPs, Grants, Gains, and Morons

Okay, maybe "moron" is a little harsh.  I just finished a painful conversation with a banker.  We argued for over an hour before he asked a superior and conceded that I actually know what I'm talking about.  Here's the deal...

ETA (Jan 10) - Okay, wait!  The following shouldn't have happened at all according to Rob Carrick AND according to the Canada Revenue Agency.  I'm still waiting for National Bank Securities to explain themselves - or for the agent I spoke to to apologize for an error that maybe had nothing to do with company policy.  And I could be out $5,000.  I'll keep you posted.  Anyway...

ETA MORE (Jan 13) - The following shouldn't have happened but for a different reason.  I got an e-mail from National Bank Securities, and they showed me the complicated formula and insist it's government imposed.  SO why doesn't the Canada Revenue Agency know about that??  BUT we're NOT back to (as I'll get to later):  if you withdraw the EAP portion in a family plan, you have to ask for a little bit at a time in hopes you don't go over,  BECAUSE the last person I spoke to at NBS completely understood what I was on about, and said she solves this problem by making a note to tell the "formula people" when someone's close to the maximum grant, and they make sure it's the full amount. Rob Carrick wasn't precisely right when he told me I could "specify the breakdown of the money", but what you CAN do, is specify the amount of grant you want, and they can figure out the formula from that figure instead of the total figure then give you the total amount later.  Too bad that first guy just didn't get it.  The problem isn't the formula, it's that some agents at NBS don't understand how to use the formula to help the customer.  Anyway... back to the beginning...

I'm at the wondrous point of withdrawing RESP contributions.  It's a tricky, tricky thing to do.  It shouldn't be, but it is.  I'm going to explain it all right here for anyone googling for advice.   First of all, if you've got a kid under 18, get an RESP - you can backpay for a few previous years if you've missed out on this windfall.  It's well worth the automatic 20% gain.  But there's a lot of information out there that explains it all from that end.  Here's what's harder to find - the withdrawing bit:

A Crisis of Environmentalist Faith

A couple of sentences from Matthew Altman (from "The Green Onion") have been weighing on me for days:

Ironically, environmentalism itself can become a means of advancing our own selfish interests, as when we barely adjust our lifestyles in order to feel a disproportionately strong sense of smugness....If a well-intentioned environmentalism does nothing for nature, it only has ["morally bankrupt"] anthropocentric value:  its contribution to the environmentalist's sense of self-satisfaction.

Is the smugness the bigger problem here or the uselessness of the pursuit?  If I do all sorts to try to save the world, and still feel devastated because I recognize what little impact I have, I'm still doing precious little for nature, and then my acts don't even have anthropocentric value.  They got nothin'! My "Sisyphean" efforts do little to actually prevent global warming.  Shockingly, my letters and petitions aren't yet being acted on in parliament.

Thanks for the Contract, Laurel!

In a cab ride yesterday, I happened to catch Laurel Broten on the radio explaining how necessary it was to first deny teachers' right to negotiate, then impose a contract, and then repeal bill 115 to make the teachers happy again, all to help decrease the insane provincial deficit.  What a hero.

My concern with her speech (and everything about this) is she presents part of the argument as if it's in its entirety.  She leaves out crucial information, and some information she includes is misleading.  It's beyond a biased presentation and sliding into propaganda territory.  And it's so easy to simplify it all to "teachers are greedy" sound-bites instead of elucidating honestly on the entire dilemma.

She suggested that unions walked away from negotiating tables because of money.  But back in April, OSSTF negotiated some substantial money-savings initiatives, and the government walked away.

On Being a Mean Mum (and Defining Bullying)

"He cut Charlie's ear, and he's driving him nuts!  Water won't hurt him; it will just remind him to stay off our porch."

"You know what you just cut, mom?  The line that connects us.  You are not my mother anymore in three...two....one.  That's it.  We're over."

My eight-year-old is mortified that I sprayed a visiting cat with water. My neighbourhood is full of wandering cats with good homes, so this is not likely a stray, but he's new to our porch.  And he's a vicious little bugger. It wasn't just my own cat's injuries that drove me to such malice.  The visitor scratched my daughter as she tried to pet it.  She's never been scratched by an animal before - so it was a personal affront as well as a physical shock.  For the record, she also terminated my matriarchal position when I insisted on washing the cuts - with soap even - and coating them with polysporin, which, apparently, soothes like battery acid.

Our (Slightly) Wounded Charlie

The Visitor

On Gun Control and Coping with Death

I've been reading way too many articles about the Sandy Hook massacre followed by an unbelievable number of inane and hurtful comments:  "Cars kill more people than guns, and cars pollute too.  So we should ban cars before we ban guns."  "If God were allowed in the schools, He would have been there to protect the children."  "If we ban guns, then only criminals will have them, and we won't be able to protect ourselves!"

You get the idea.

Until a few days ago, it was legal to carry a concealed weapon in all but two areas of the U.S.  But then, by a two to one vote just last week, it was deemed unconstitutional to ban people from carrying a concealed weapon in Illinois.  Now the only place so restrained is Washington, D.C..  Curious.  But state to state, there are still different levels of restrictions on guns, and different types of guns that can be bought and sold, and, according to one study, that has a clear link to the safety of that state.

You Say You Want a Revolution...

I'm in the midst of marking a pile of essays, but some thoughts are gnawing at me.  It makes it difficult to concentrate, so I'll purge before continuing a late-night marking spree.

Students are having a day of protest tomorrow (today) to rally against the burgeoning loss of extracurriculars in Ontario high-schools.  I love a good protest, and I'm behind their energy and drive in spades!  But I'm afraid this bit of activism will be less provocative than desired.  I hope I'm wrong.  I hope Broten comes to town and apologizes for everything, and we all go back to normal.  But, for that to happen, or anything really, a protest requires a little more....

Substance

The students want to protest, yet stay neutral.  They're not taking sides.  Their slogan is, "Let Us Play."  They're hoping for 1,000 people to attend, and that would be cool.  But what will they do with them?  Without a stand, what's the plan of action?  They don't want their lives affected, and some students have likened this experience to having mommy and daddy arguing with the children in the middle.  Except they're not little any more.  And this isn't mere bickering.  If students want to get involved in this pivotal argument, they can't just beg for the arguing to stop because it's interfering with their fun.  If they actually want to take an active part in making a different, they have to pay attention to what's being said and choose a side.

On the Importance of Workers' Rights

Disclaimer:  I'm not speaking for my school or union or for teachers in general.  The following is my personal view of the situation as a high-school teacher with three kids in school.

Last Thursday, Luisa D'Amato wrote a scathing article about boneheaded teacher action that, in effect, prevents some kids from going on a field trip or two.  Her solution to our turmoil is for everyone to join the Liberal party so we can better influence their decisions.  I responded to her by e-mail, but I'll share it here. Her article in full is at the bottom.

It's an interesting one because our sons were both going to go on a Federal/Provincial simulation game together that was kiboshed by the board's response to sanctions.  So, as moms, we're in the same boat - but sitting at opposite ends.

On Environmental Intentions

A week ago, The Globe and Mail published an "essay" on the Facts & Arguments page about a woman who has chosen to retire from being an ecowarrior.  (Remember about twenty years ago when that page actually had essays on it - rigorously argued claims of interest instead of personal anecdotes??  Anyway...)   I can't link to articles from The Globe anymore because I don't pay for the on-line service - but I did get the photo attached.  You'll just have to trust my quotations are accurate.

GMOs: Knowledge Roulette

A new documentary on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) is travelling the cybersphere right now.  It's a compelling exploration that suggests GMOs could be causing the increase in intestinal disorders, autism, skin disorders (the three often go together - I know firsthand), cancers, and other health problems.  A red flag for me, though was the number of individual farmer and mom testimonials of the miracle that happened as soon as they took their animals/kids off GMOs, and, at the end, a story of a puppy that preferred to eat non-GM food over GM food.  Hmmm....

The documentary has been rigorously criticized point by point at Academics Review, and, after some hunting (because it's not clear on the site), it seems the criticism originated from Biofortified.com which is chalk full of good news about GMOs.  The authors are all scientifically educated, but I wonder if their bias is subsidized.

On the Academics Review site, they describe Jeffrey Smith as

"once nearly as well known for his swing-dancing lessons as his “expertise” in biotech agriculture. Still, Smith, who has also enjoyed longtime ties to Fairfield’s Maharishi religious group and the state’s Natural Law political party, travels the world reading excerpts from his two self-published books on genetic engineering."  

At Biofortified, the authors and editors list their own favourite produce.  I'm not fond of attempts to ingratiate me with cuteness, and ad hominem arguments also raise red flags.  It doesn't follow that, because he can swing dance, he can't also be an expert on GMOs.

And here's Jeffrey Smith's rebuttal on the point by point opposition.

And the burning question is, how can we know who's the honest, unbiased, reporter here?

On Finding Meaning Through Love

At the end of Luc Ferry's A Brief History of Thought or Learning to Live: A User's Manual (same thing), he suggests that we can get salvation and transcendence outside any religious belief system by being elevated through a singular love.  The rest of the book is a chronology of philosophy epochs, and I might think more on that later, but I'm mainly interested in his own ideas about love saving the day.

Luc Ferry was the Minister of Education in France for a few years, and I looked him up to see how that went.  A philosopher in government - how Platonic!  I tried to find out what policies he implemented or proposed, but could only find scandals about him working at a university but never teaching and then refusing to refund his salary when they asked.  Apparently his response to this was to sue accusers for libel.  And then, to make his case about the importance of privacy, he told TV reporters about a former minister who sexually abused some children, and he refused to tell the public his name because personal privacy is that important (or maybe because libel laws are so strong suggesting they're a bad thing, but then why would he sue for libel himself?).  Something like that.

I don't think personal privacy trumps the safety of children.  Just sayin'.  But from all the reports, I don't entirely understand his full intentions when he threw that out there on national television.

On Addictive Pleasures and the Fear of Death

I recently read Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve, a book about the hiding and finding of the 1st century poem On the Nature of Things by Lucretius, which is a tribute to  Epicurus and his philosophy.  Lucretius writes of Epicurus, "When 'human life lay groveling ignominously in the dust, crushed beneath the grinding weight of superstition' one supremely brave man arose and became 'the first who ventured to confront it boldly'" (72).  I'm not sure the poem ushered in the modern world when it was unearthed in the 15th century, as Greenblatt suggests, but the book is quite provocative nonetheless.  And then I read Luc Ferry's A Brief History of Thought - a trip through the major western philosophies, which almost completely ignores Epicurus.  Curious.  I'll get to Ferry's book another day.

Epicurus' philosophy was developed about 300 BCE, and a few centuries later people attempted to destroy it as it was totally incompatible with the Christian way of life - particularly the bits about all things being made of atoms (adopted from Democritus).  If everything's made of atoms, then nothing is better than anything else, so the entire hierarchy of the church is a problem as is our insistence that human beings are superior to all other creatures.  Also, it means we don't stay together as one being when we die, so the possibility of an afterlife falls apart (and the hopeful justice measured out in rewards and punishments to be found there).  And choosing a life of pleasure over pain?  That's just going way too far for many old school Christians .

I had a couple stop-and-think-about-it-for-a-few-days episodes reading The Swerve (these are off the beaten path from his general thesis):

On Young Feminists

This has been making its way around facebook recently:  Why are young women so afraid to call themselves feminists?

I still regularly hear students say, "I'm not a feminist, but...."  They know intuitively there's still an injustice here, but they're loathe to openly address it.

It makes me think of a study done with a group of people waiting in a room to have a test administered as part of an experiment.  The first subject was taken, secretly an actor, and pretended to have trouble with the test.  She was subsequently given increasing electric shocks by the administrator.  The real experiment, of course, was about the subjects listening and reacting to the experience from the waiting room.  At first, they all felt badly for the woman, but, after a short time, powerless to help, they began to denigrate her. "The more the victim suffered, the lower their opinion of her became" (p.211-12). By the end of the test, they despised her as she yelped at each pretend jolt of electricity.  The researcher's conclusion:  we have an unconscious bias against those who come out at the bottom.

Suffer Not the God-Fearing LGBTQ

The Chick-fil-A issue in California is a good reminder that we're not done.  That hundreds of people filled the restaurants in support of CEO Dan Cathy's admission that he supports "the biblical definition of the family unit" while a few LGBTQ supporters had kiss-ins, is a wake-up call that we can't be complacent about human rights.  They waver.  Just when we think we've got everyone convinced to be  accepting of harmless differences, we hit a backlash.

The religious argument about biblical definitions slays me because it completely misses the point of the Christian bit of the Bible - you know, where Jesus tells everyone to be nice to one another.  Specifically, we're not to judge anyone at all because that's God's job (Matthew7:1-5).  If you start judging your neighbour, then you're trying to act like God, and that's not cool at all.  It lifts quite a burden to stop policing one another like children do.  Don't worry about what other people are doing (unless they're causing you direct harm) because God will deal with them later.  The world is just and fair, just not right here on Earth.  All we have to do is love everyone.

On Putting the Brakes on Car Culture

I love biking and walking everywhere, but Waterloo Region - and many other places - sucks for cyclists and pedestrians.  I lived in Ottawa for a year, and it totally ruined me for any other city.  They have off-road bike lanes so cyclists don't have to dodge storm drains, garbage, parked cars, and the ever-feared, sudden and deadly driver-side-door-openings.  And when that wasn't feasible, at the very least they had barriers between bikes and cars (see photo - sweet, eh?).  A recent editorial in the G&M suggests that's most important:

"Designing bike lanes physically separated from other traffic – like those now popping up in Montreal, Vancouver and other cities across Canada – is the key to shifting commuters out of cars or buses and on to bicycles."

But if we can't do that, because we're running out of room on the streets as it is, all it would take to make our city less car-centric is to enforce some existing laws and guidelines that have been forgotten along the way and to stop building multi-lane roundabouts.

On Nuclear Power

The only safe nuclear reactor is 93-million miles away, the sun -  Daniel Hirsch

We've got record temperatures, and lots of truly frightening climate change data, just in time for a regional by-election.  The Ontario Clean Air Alliance (OCAA) is working to make nuclear power an issue this election.  It seems to me that if we want to wean ourselves off nuclear, we all have to vote NDP.

We don't have any recent movies like Silkwood (a true story) or The China Syndrome (in theatres 12 days before the 3-Mile Island accident) to scare the bejesus out of people anymore.



We just have real life.  But some still believe that nuclear is the way to get us out of this greenhouse gas mess we're in.